Despite occasional recent high-profile incidents, the risk of dying while flying has become lower with each decade, according to a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The report says that the risks of death have been halved just in the past ten years, and that in general, commercial flying has become roughly twice as safe each decade since the 1960s. The researchers estimate that flying today is about 39 times safer than in the late 1960s.
The MIT report’s lead author, Arnold Barnett, says “You might think there is some irreducible risk level we can’t get below, and yet, the chance of dying during an air journey keeps dropping by about seven per cent annually, and continues to go down by a factor of two every decade.”
They attributed some of the decline to improved aviation technology on the ground and in airplanes, and offered an interesting bit for travelers who try to avoid particular planes, especially the Boeing 737 because of hyped-up news. They point out that the world’s safest airline in numbers of passengers carried without a single fatal accident is Ryanair, whose entire fleet is Boeing 737s.
